We Made Melita
Hotel Keepers
John and Mary Cobb
Prior to 1880, John Cobb, who was born in Lechfield County, Quebec, was
engaged in logging and the lumber industry in the Ottawa Valley. In
1880, along with his wife Mary and their ten children, he proceeded
west to Winnipeg, where he obtained contracts to build rail-bed for the
C.P.R. which was pushing its way west across the prairie at that time.
During this operation the family was established at Gopher Creek, near
Virden, where the children obtained schooling. At the conclusion of his
contract work near Calgary, John Cobb returned to Virden and erected a
hotel which he operated for a few years. In 1890, he decided to move
his family to Melita, a new town that was springing up approximately 40
miles to the south. He sold the Virden enterprise to new owners with
the intention of build-
ing a new hotel in Melita.
It is to be remembered that the railway did not arrive at Melita until
1891, and so it was necessary to haul building materials for the hotel
from both Virden and Deloraine for part of the construction with
horse-drawn wagons over prairie trails. During the period of
construction, the family, along with the carpenters employed at the
building site, were housed in a
double-decker tent. It was situated directly across the street from the
site of the Metropolitan Hotel. A frame lean-to kitchen and two rooms
housed the family, and from here they prepared the food which they
served in the large dining room on the ground floor. Even at this time,
two rooms on the upper deck were reserved for any travellers who might
need accommodation. Upon the arrival of the railway, the hotel was
completed, the pride of the village and the finest of its kind for
miles around
Adapted from Our First Century, page 482 Submitted by Ken
Cobb
Photo from the Manitoba Archives (1914)
A Day in the Life of a Small Town Hotel
“Running a small-town Manitoba hotel in the early 1900s was hard work.
The hotel staff usually consisted of at least two chambermaids and a
cook who worked from morning till night, cleaning the guest rooms,
doing the laundry, and washing dishes. The maid's work day usually
started at 6:00 a.m. and ended at 9:00 p.m. for which she was paid $10
per month, plus room and board. Porters not only assisted hotel guests
with their luggage; they also washed dishes, milked the cows that
supplied the milk for the hotel and did all the odd jobs. The upstairs
maid also polished the silver and glassware and kept everything
shining.
All members of the hotel owner’s family had to share in the work of
running the hotel. “One of the duties of the kids was to help with the
housekeeping and at noon you had to take your turn at washing the
dishes before going back to school. My sister, Irma, served as a
waitress in the dining room when she was barely taller than the table
tops.” “The years in the Hotel were busy ones for all of the family. It
was the boys’ job to fire the wood-burning furnace. This meant rising
about three a.m. and again at six to stoke the furnace. … We were
responsible for bringing in blocks of ice and snow to melt for the
daily wash. … We hauled our drinking water from the town well.”
Wash days – usually Mondays – were an ordeal, especially in winter.
Washing bedding and clothes was often a two-day proposition. Water had
to be hauled and then heated in tubs the night before. Start-up time
was set for five or six a.m. and the laundry process quite often ran
into the afternoon. The next day, one of the maids would run the
clothes and sheets through a mangle, a machine used to wring water out
of wet laundry. Most hotels did not get running water until the 1940s
or 1950s, so water had to be hauled from a well in the summer. In the
winter, hotels used melted ice and snow, or water that had been
collected in rain barrels during the previous summer.”
© Joan Champ, 2011
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